Promo Blurb: The quiet college town of Blackridge is being haunted by a soaring shadow, a dark, winged shape with antlers. On the ground, weird agents are looking for something, terrorizing people in their homes and then disappearing. Is it just a coincidence that there's a nuclear power plant nearby?
For this one, I had five players, taking the Ascendant, Fixer, Karcist, Mystic, and Scrapper characters. They were third level, high enough to have some cool powers, but low enough that they can't just rampage through the town. I opened with the statement that they had all done a little bit of Storm walking, but this was a familiar town on a familiar world. The Fixer was actually a student at the local college (University of Arkansas at Blackridge) and the Karcist was his dad.
As the blurb promises, there had been some weird sightings and some suspicious retractions, and the heroes were there to check it out. Also, there wasn't really a nuke plant in town, but several people had seen the ghostly image of one across the lake.
After finding out what they could from their senile motel manager, they headed out to the college to interview students. After stalking a few, they found their way to Matt, a zine publisher who was able to point them in the direction of Jim and Stacy, who had seen the creature, and to Doctor Morton, who had made a public statement and then retracted it. Also, there had been bigfoot sightings at the Cliffs overlooking the river, but not even Matt put much stock in those stories. The Mystic and the Fixer saw a cloud that looked like a steam plume from a nuclear plant.
Morton wasn't terribly helpful, but Jim and Stacy independently provided fairly consistent accounts of an encounter on a hiking trail on Chactas Mountain. The Ascendant had a strange, brief conversation with a man in a suit. They really did see Bigfoot at the Cliffs, much to the Fixer's delight. The Karcist nailed him with a magic feather and he floated off into the foliage below.
On a nocturnal trip to the lake, they encountered a pair of eyeless children whose psychic assault almost killed the Karcist. The Ascendant encountered another man in a suit hidden in the trees, but he (the man in black, not the Ascendant) disappeared during the fight with the other creatures. I was gratified by the level of creepedoutedness my players displayed in reaction to this encounter.
Finally, they made their way out to Chactas Mountain, where the Karcist's ghostly helper led them to the peryton, actually just a winged shadow-humanoid with smoky tendrils twisting up from its head. In the fight, it was destroyed fairly quickly, only to release a fiery wraith from its charcoal-coated skeleton. The wraith was eventually destroyed by the Scrapper's crystal knife as well, leaving a fine, iridescent dust which the Fixer collected in a canteen.
Renting a boat from Ray's 24-Hour Marine, they went out to the nuclear plant and confirmed the Mystic's intuition that the forces drawing it towards this reality (which would have been extremely disruptive) had been neutralized by the creature's destruction. There was other stuff that led them to all this information, but that's the general idea.
And, damn it, I forgot to tell them about interrupts, which is a pity, because interrupts are cool.
Back to the Gen Con Write-Up:
http://www.christinalea.com/2015/08/gencon15.html
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